Joshua Gamson
JOSHUA GAMSON is a Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco.
Book:
MODERN FAMILIES: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship Joshua Gamson, Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco, maps the large, complex terrain of the modern kinship and presents a personal, intimate account of social change from the inside out. He brings us extraordinary family creation tales—his own included—that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales—adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families—set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made. Yet each of these families, however they came to be, shares the same universal joys that all families share.
MODERN FAMILIES aims to shatter the secrecy and shame that often surrounds today’s unconventional families. “Stories help make things make sense,” Gamson stresses, encouraging parents to embrace new bedtime stories for the children they’ve conceived—through love, determination, and ingenuity, if not traditional reproductive biology.
